Max Mosley will stand down as president of the FIA next year. He has reached the decision despite growing pressure to stand for re-election for a post he has occupied since 1991.

Mosley insisted he had been considering retirement even before revelations about his private life were published by the News of the World four months ago. Last week he won £60,000 damages from News International, publisher of the newspaper, after a high court ruling that his sadomasochistic orgy with five prostitutes in a London flat did not have Nazi overtones as it alleged.

Appearing unruffled by the court case Mosley, himself a former barrister, remained defiantly unapologetic about his behaviour and suggested that those who disapproved of his sex life were out of step with the mood of the times.

"The truth of the matter is this - that no grown up person gives the slightest damn about what other people do in their sex lives," he said. "It is not even a subject for discussion. It used to be 50 years ago that if someone was gay then it was a big drama. In England it was illegal and you could go to prison. But all that is now finished - people don't care.

"So as long as it is adults and it is consensual and it is private and, as they say, you don't frighten the horses, then nobody cares. The grown-ups simply don't care and the people who do care are not worth talking to," he added in Autosport.

Mosley says he will spend his remaining 15 months in office working to enhance formula one's green credentials while slashing costs to make life more affordable for the independent teams. He will also sort out a new agreement to guarantee a more equitable division of the sport's commercial rights income.

"There are a large number of people in the FIA who are saying that I must run again in 2009," Mosley confided. "I don't want to, because to be very, very honest, I want to stop going to work every day. It is that thing that every morning you cannot believe how much work there is to do.

"A lot of people with ambitions think all you do is put on a blazer and an armband and you are president of the FIA. You can do it like that, but then you are not the person in control - it is the secretary general. So if you want to have any influence, you have to do an awful lot of work."